Sean Dyche Burnley
Sean Dyche believes taking a longer-term view on the coronavirus crisis is paying off for the Clarets. The Burnley boss has already given his players some downtime and is now building up their personal training programs ahead of a potential return to training and then ultimately matches. How that will look is the subject of much debate with Dyche believing there are ways to gradually get football back up and running again in the weeks to come.
Sean Dyche said “We are literally at the rules of the Government at the moment. We’re all in lockdown and if and when that starts releasing then we’lll be given guidelines through the Government in to the Premier League and then through the chairman and CEOs and back into us. How that then opens up we’ll see. Does it open up in small groups? Does it open up with constant testing through the teams on a two-or-three-day basis? We’ll have to wait and see. At the moment the players are doing distance programmes and we are ramping that up now slightly. We are building that up, we are adding their GPS units and just monitoring them more closely. We actually had a bit of foresight when this first really started. We thought it was going to go on longer so we actually gave the players a 10 to 14-day break where we just said ‘make sure everyone’s well, look after your families, don’t worry about anything, take a load off’. Then we’ve started building back up from there. We’ve tried to look at it with a longer view and so far that’s worked. But we haven’t got any intelligence on when it is going to go back to normal or some form of normal. When we get that then I’m sure we’ll have some guidelines on what we should be doing or allowed to do and then we’ll work within that.”
Sean Dyche remains of the view that getting those matches played and the campaign completed should be the principle aim at the moment believing football can have a wider role in society getting back to normal.
Sean Dyche said “We’d like it to be finished. If football can play its part in giving something back, because football is a powerful thing, we’d try and look for that thing first. If we can give something back through the games, even if it is behind closed doors, but it can be beamed out through different media streams, then I think that’s got to be a good thing. Back to our part in that world, we’d like to finish the season, because ideally, if we can, it’s right and proper to do so. It gives you a chance to realign yourself for next season knowing that it’s at least been finished. If we don’t find a way then it will be a strange one because if you think of the period the players will have suddenly had off then and away from the training environment. That in itself changes things and then by next pre-season, let’s imagine it’s kind of July time, are we in a massively different place? Then it’s going into next season so where do you draw the line? It should be done if it can be. I think it would be good for the fans, it would be good for people around the world who love football. If it can’t be done, health has to come first, we all know that.”
The Clarets are 10th in the Premier League with a potential spot in Europe to play for in the final nine games of their season.
